• On August 20, 1949, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh was casually observing the sky one night near Las Cruces, New Mexico, with his wife and mother-in-law beside him. In February 1930, he had been comparing sets of photographic plates taken of the night sky when he noted one star seemed to have moved from one night to the next; he had discovered the planet Pluto. But on this night, nearly 20 years later, he and his family saw something completely different that left him perplexed. They saw a half-dozen rectangles of greenish light, moving together in a line from the northwest to the southeast. It was as if they were windows on a long, cylindrical object, moving about 35 degrees in altitude, making no sound as they sped rapidly across the sky and vanished within three or four seconds.
On June 30, 1948, a cigar-shaped object flew by a cargo ship, shining a light on the water as it passed by.
In 1941, the United States built an Air Force Base at Goose Bay in the heart of Labrador, a strategic location, leading to the ocean. It facilitated anti-submarine exercises and staging of aircraft on overseas flights. A set of Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line sites was constructed in Labrador during the Cold War and monitored at a NORAD site at Goose Bay beginning in 1953. The 641 Aircraft Warning and Control Squadron was based there and began flying missions for “surveillance, identification, and interceptor control.”
Given this mandate, when the flying saucer phenomenon began spreading in the 1940s and unidentified aircraft were being reported, Goose Bay seemed to be a major hotspot. It was not surprising that an American airbase on Canadian soil might be the site of many saucer sightings, just like so many other bases worldwide.
What is perhaps a bit surprising, however, is that there were so many saucer sightings at Goose Bay. In the 1940s and 1950s, there were 20 known reports, a considerable number for such a remote base. Most people were unaware of what was being seen and reported by pilots and other military personnel, although rumours of events persisted over the years.
The first known sighting near Goose Bay took place in the summer of 1948 and was described by a military witness who came forward much after the fact, relating his story to UFO investigators. He provided few details but painted a picture that can be easily visualized, showing the reaction of the intelligence community and the command chain.
UFOS AND ALIENS IN LITERATURE
In 1938 C.S. Lewis published Out of the Silent Planet, the first of a trilogy of books in which people from Earth travel to Mars (here called Malacandra) where they encounter a race of intelligent seal-like creatures called hrossa and others. However, the caretaker of the planet is Oyarsa, an angelic being who belongs to a race that oversees intelligent life. Unfortunately, the being in charge of the Earth has become evil, and as a result we have fallen from grace.
Major Edwin A. Jerome, USAF (Ret.), stated that in the summer of 1948, a high-ranking inspection team was visiting the base’s radar facilities as part of a tour looking at refuelling and servicing capabilities for all military and civilian aircraft on North Atlantic air routes. During the generals’ inspection of the USAF radar shack, the operator painted a high-speed target on his scope going from the northeast to the southwest with a calculated speed of about 15,000 kilometres per hour. This caused considerable concern since the base personnel wanted to look good in front of the inspection team, and such a calculation must have been an error.
Jerome noted: “The poor airman technician was brought to task for his apparent miscalculation.” However, when the target appeared a second time, the brass saw the target on the screen themselves. They dismissed it as poorly calibrated American equipment. They then went to the Canadian side of the base to inspect the RCAF facility and learned that the equipment there had also just tracked the same or similar object. The inspecting officers branded the incident a coincidence. The anomalous target on both scopes had been moving at speeds faster than anything known to be possible.
Jerome was an intelligence officer at the base and was ordered to make a report on the incident. It had been suggested that the object was a meteor, but when he interviewed radar operators on both sides of the base, he found the object was tracked as it maintained an altitude of 18,000 metres throughout its flight and he believed this ruled out a meteor as a possibility. While conducting his investigation, he was shocked to learn that the very next day, both radars again reported an anomalous object, this time moving slowly over the base at about 16 kilometres per hour at 14,000 metres. This time, the anomaly was explained as “high-flying seagulls.”
Remember, this case occurred long before rockets and jet aircraft were capable of such speeds or high-altitude helicopters were possible. The consternation of the inspectors and the embarrassment of the radar technicians must have been considerable, and was something that was talked about in the mess hall for many weeks.
If a radar case is explained as being due to faulty equipment, technicians point out that the same equipment is used to track known military operations without malfunctions. You can’t really have it both ways; either the equipment was working or it wasn’t.
Through the rest of the decade, there were four more known sightings at Goose Bay. Three of these were October 29, 31, and November 1, 1948, with little information available on the first two other than that they were noted in Project Blue Book. But Donald Keyhoe, a noted journalist and author of several UFO books, described the cases this way, citing the third case as well:
One of the first cases, involving three separate incidents, took place in Labrador, at Goose Bay Air Force Base. About 3 a.m. on October 29, 1948, an unidentified object in slow level flight was tracked by tower radar men. Two days later, the same thing happened again. But the following night, on November 1, radar men got a jolt. Some strange object making 600 mph was tracked for four minutes before it raced off on a southwest course. At the time, weather conditions were considered as a possible answer. But … this obviously must be ruled out.
A fourth Labrador sighting took place on September 9, 1949, when a military aircraft pilot saw an egg-shaped object disappear into a cloud at a high speed.
In the 1950s, UFOs were again plaguing the Goose Bay air force base. On September 14, 1951, at 9:30 p.m., another sighting there was recorded in Blue Book case files, listed as No. 969.
Technical Sergeant W. B. Maupin and Corporal J.W. Green were witnesses when two objects were tracked on radar on a collision course. One of the radar operators attempted to warn the objects of the imminent collision and was surprised to watch one avoid danger by moving to the right. A third unidentified track then joined the first two. The entire incident lasted more than 15 minutes. No aircraft were known to be in the area.
It’s difficult to say what might have happened in the radar booth that night. It’s likely that someone there remembered the unfortunate incident with the visiting dignitaries just three years earlier and wanted to avoid another reprimand. So, he logically decided that the unknown objects were aircraft and handled them as unidentified traffic, vectoring them to safety. It appears rather unlikely, however, that two spacecraft from another planet would need assistance from a terrestrial radar operator for flight directions.
The next year, another weird “something” was reported over Goose Bay. Edward Ruppelt, former head of Project Blue Book said that